Friday, March 9, 2012

The first section below features character ranking information for Super Turbo Blanka from a wide variety of sources. In the second section we'll look at how Blanka players have fared at tournaments for the past decade or so.

When I first started working on this I thought I would come up with a scientific approach to character rankings. That was foolish of me. It's the ineffability of tier lists that makes them fun to discuss! Some characters are stronger than others, but the precise order is unknowable. Good news is that a simple name change was enough to keep the ship afloat:Blanka Diagram ProjectBlanka Diagram and Tourney Trends

Below I juxtapose players' rankings with real-world tourney results. This is offered as an academic curiosity; I want to stress that I make no claim about a relationship between the two sets of figures.

UPDATE 3/20/12: AFO sent some updated match-up assessments.

Part One: Blanka Diagram

In this table I've compiled character ranking information for Blanka from a wide variety of sources.

InternetI was going to include the numbers from this wiki but it's broken at the moment.

Real ResultsThe percentages from part two below rounded to the nearest five with the decimal point moved one place. Again, I make no claim about what this means.

Char.

RY

KE

EH

CH

ZA

GU

DH

TH

CA

FE

DJ

BX

CL

SG

DI

+/-

Source

Internet

3

6

5

5

8

6

4

8

4

4

3

2

4

3

7

-3

T.Akiba

3.5

4

4

3.5

7

6

5

6

5

5

2.5

3

4

2.5

5

-9

Super Diagram Turbo

3

5

3

4

8

6

5

7

5

4

4

3

5

6

5

-2

Huekie Saver

Players

5

5

4.5

5.5

7

7.5

6

6

5

5

4.5

2.5

3.5

3

5.5

+0.5

Decoy

3

4

2

3

7

5

3

8

4

4

2

2

4

3

6

-15

Kareeeeem

3

5

3

3

6

5

3

7

3

3

3

2

3

3

6

-17

AFO

4

5

2

5

6

6

3

7

4

4

1

1

5

5

3

-14

AR2-CNA

4

5

4

4

6.5

5

4.5

8

5

4.5

3.5

3

4.5

4

6

-3.5

Shinryu

Magazines

5

6

3

4

7

6

4

7

6

4

4

4

5

5

5

0

Gamest

2.5

5

2.5

3

6

4

2

7

4

3.5

2.5

2.5

3.5

2

6.5

-18.5

Arcadia

Results

4.5

5

2.5

4

5.5

5.5

3.5

7

6

4.5

5

2.5

3.5

5.5

4.5

-6

All Matches

3.5

6

3

4

5.5

5.5

2.5

7

-

4.5

3

1.5

4.5

-

5.5

-9

Top Players

Part Two: Tourney Trends

These two charts show Blanka players' wins and losses going back to 2000. Results come from Japanese tournaments in various formats. I've got events big and small: from X-Mania and SBO through five-man Game41 tourneys but I'm light on Star Cup results as those are not typically posted game-by-game. No gachi battles nor casuals. HSF2 when both sides used ST characters.

The grey bars for Blanka just show how often they encountered each other. Results vs. other Old Honda players were set aside. Also set aside were characters that came up very few times: O.Sagat (10), O.Ryu (8), O.Zangief (6), O.Dhalsim (1), O.Cammy (1), Akuma (1)

The "top player" graph includes fights amongst the following players. There were too few matches for Blanka vs. Cammy and Blanka vs. Sagat.

There's way too little data. Even if you tried to do something like this for SF4 just not enough tourney matches occur you're always going to be light. People could just fight long sets FOR SCIENCE like AFO vs. yaya 100 games but casual not the same as tourney plus different kind of endurance comes into play.

And b) no matter what we're talking about human players. Top players in fact possibly the most idiosyncratic. I mean Daigo his ultimate weapon is unpredictability but he gets carried away with it sometimes waits an odd beat when he could have simply pressed a button. Or in ST Yuu will run a health deficit just to crush your soul when he beats you but it doesn't always work.